The ‘footnotes’ focused on here are two massacres perpetrated by Israel in 1956. And when dealing with historical process – the changing shape of the camps, for example – the pictures are more than useful. So is the fact that almost every Palestinian male has a cigarette in his mouth. The cranes at work on a Jerusalem skyline are worth a paragraph or two of background. Sacco depicts fear, humiliation and anger very well indeed, and often achieves far more with one picture than he could in an entire newspaper column. The pictures – aerial shots, action shots, urban still lifes, crafted but realist character studies – work as hard as the words. History chokes on fresh episodes and swallows whatever old ones it can.” It can’t help producing pages by the hour, by the minute. And you can see why… History has its hands full. From time to time, as bolder, more streamlined editions appear, history shakes off some footnotes altogether. Footnotes are inessential at best at worst they trip up the greater narrative. Here, for instance, is page nine: “History can do without its footnotes. The writing, however, is at least as good as you’d expect from a high quality prose work. But Joe Sacco’s "Footnotes in Gaza" is just that, an unusually effective treatment of Palestinian history which may appeal to people who would never read a ‘normal book’ on the subject. This is not what you expect: an accomplished and self-reflective work of history enclosed within a layer of war reportage – in comic book form.
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